Women Are Being Sexually Assaulted After Being Forced To Take Sick “Test”

In Afghanistan, women are constantly and consistently being abused sexually under the outrageous pretense of “virginity testing” committed on girls who are thought to have possibly been engaged in premarital sex, Human Rights Watch has claimed.

Fourteen years after the toppling of the Islamist Taliban regime in the country, violence and harassment levels against women aren’t shrinking. Instead, they’re steadily growing.

Premarital sex, which is punishable by up to 15 years in jail in the country, was the subject of a study by Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission, in which 53 women and girls, ages 13 and older were accused of fornication, and out of those 53, 48 were subjected to virginity exams.

Almost half of them were examined multiple times in the presence of multiple people, according to the HRW report released on Monday.

“These so-called virginity exams are not just demeaning — they constitute sexual assault and are often used as evidence against women in court for the ‘crime’ of zina, or sex outside of marriage,” said HRW researcher Heather Barr.

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“The continued use of degrading and unscientific virginity exams by the Afghan government is part of a broader pattern of abuses in which women and girls are jailed on spurious ‘moral crimes’ accusations, often in situations where they are fleeing forced marriage or domestic violence.”

Even within conservative Islamic nations, virginity testing is widely discredited.

The World Health Organization has denouced the practice as having “no scientific validity.”